Untouchable (31 page)

His mom pulled a bottle of olive oil out of the cupboard. It slipped from her hands, fell to the floor. His mom’s movements a little clunky, a little inexact. The cap popped off, spilling oil across the linoleum in a shimmery pool.

“Goddamnit,” his mom said.

“Lucy,” his dad said, that low warning voice.

“Goddamnit.” His mom just about yelling now, so The Kid had to sing even louder to block it out.

“Kid,” his dad said. “Take it outside, okay?”

But The Kid didn’t want to take it outside. He wanted to be even louder, to blot this out, get it to stop. He kept singing, all the parts of the song that he knew.

His mom knelt in the kitchen, wiping at the oil with a dishrag, but really just spreading the oil even further across the floor.

“Kid,” his dad said, but The Kid kept singing as loud as he could and then his mom dropped the dishrag and grabbed the bottle and banged it on the floor, once, twice, three times. Trying to get it to break, it seemed like, and when it wouldn’t break she started banging it even harder.

“Shut up,” she said. “Whitley, goddamnit, will you please shut up.”

The Kid stopped, standing between the living room and the kitchen, not sure what to look at, who to look at.

His mom banging the bottle again. “Godammnit just please shut up.”

“Enough,” his dad said. Grabbing her hand, grabbing the bottle. “Lucy, that’s enough.”

His mom stayed kneeling on the kitchen floor, staring at the microphone hanging from The Kid’s hand. Shaking her head. Not crying, just shaking her head.

“Please,” she said. “Please.”

The phone rang and for a second The Kid didn’t know where he was, what was happening. He tried to focus on the glowing hands of his alarm clock. Just after one in the morning. The phone rang again. He got out of bed, went to his window. The driveway was empty. His dad still hadn’t come home. He went down into the dark kitchen, picked up the phone, waited. There was noise on the other end of the line, air-hiss. The Kid thought he could hear cars in the distance, traffic sounds.

“Kid?” It was Michelle’s muffled voice. She sounded far away. “Kid?”

The Kid waited, the phone cool to his ear.

“Kid, someone took my bag.” Michelle’s voice sounded strange. Scared. Like when they’d run from her mom’s boyfriend, maybe worse.

“They took my bag and so I just ran. I found your last name in this phone book. I remembered your last name and street and found it.” There was a rush of air in the receiver as she turned her head, looking around to see if she was being followed, maybe. “I’m going to the house,” she said. “I’m going to sleep at the house.”

For a second The Kid thought she was coming to his house, but then he figured out what she meant. He wanted to tell her that she couldn’t go there, that was one time only. He wanted to tell her that place was his, but there was nothing he could do.

“Come meet me at the house if you can,” she said. “I need another flashlight, anything else you can bring.” Her voice shaking like she was going to cry.

“They took my bag,” she said. “I couldn’t stop them. They just took it.”

The Kid came up onto the porch of the burned house. He heard breathing in the darkness. Michelle sat in the corner, arms at her sides, legs splayed out in front of her. She was trying to catch her breath. She had run there from wherever she’d been. The library, wherever. There was a hole in the knee of her jeans that The Kid didn’t think had been there before. He wondered why she hadn’t gone inside the burned house, but then he realized that she was afraid to go in without him. She was brave but she wasn’t that brave.

She didn’t want to talk about her bag, what had happened to it. She was angry and scared in equal parts. The Kid was a little afraid of her in this state. It seemed like she might snap at any second, take it all out on him.

He’d brought sandwiches, the last of the juice boxes. He couldn’t find another flashlight, but he’d found a book of his dad’s matches in one of the kitchen cabinets. He knew that he wasn’t supposed to touch matches, that it was possibly dangerous to give them to Michelle, but then he figured, what was the worst she could do to the house? Burn it down?

“Did Matthew get caught?” she said.

The Kid shook his head.

“So nobody knows about this place still?”

The Kid shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about Matthew, didn’t want to talk about secrets. He opened the security door. The air inside the house didn’t seem so bad anymore. The Kid didn’t think they needed the goggles or masks. He led her inside, through the front room, down the hall. It was almost completely dark. Only the light from the street through the window-holes, the holes in the roof, but he knew the place well, could make his way through. Michelle held onto the back of his jacket the whole time.

Moonlight shone through the hole in the living room roof, illuminating parts of the red-haired woman, the white glints on her boots, the glow of her skin. She looked ghostly for the first time, looked like an actual ghost. The Kid needed to finish the drawing, complete the signal, but he didn’t want to rush without knowing how to draw a good hand. He needed more time to practice. Better to get it right than to rush and screw it up completely.

The Kid set down his backpack, unloaded the cookies and sandwiches and juice. He took out the issues of
Extraordinary Adventures
he’d found in the garage.

“Now what?” Michelle said.

The Kid didn’t know. He didn’t want her to stay there, but he couldn’t think of a better place. He took out the book of matches, thought for a second, motioned for Michelle to stay put. He made his way back through the house, out onto the porch. The small ring of candles was still there. Maybe he shouldn’t touch the candles. Maybe taking a candle would be a real blasphemy, like knocking over a gravestone. But what was Michelle going to do, sit back there in the dark all night? He took the largest candle from the ring, a red candle in a tall glass holder. The Kid didn’t like this at all, but what was one more blasphemy at this point, really?

They sat on the living room floor. Michelle ate the sandwiches, drank the juice. The candlelight flickered on the walls, making different parts of the mural jump and move.

“Sorry about your books,” Michelle said. “Your
Captain America
comics. They were in my bag.”

The Kid hadn’t thought about that. Those comics were gone now, too. He was a little angry with her, being so careless with things that weren’t hers. Those were good comics.

Michelle finished the juice and The Kid stood, brushed off the back of his pants.

“Where are you going?”

He tilted his head toward the hallway.

“You’re going home?”

He nodded.

“When does your dad get home from work?”

The Kid shrugged, picked up his backpack, strapped it over his shoulders.

“If he’s not going to be home for a while, you might as well stay here.”

That sound was back in her voice, the shaky sound from the phone call. The Kid set his backpack on the floor, sat down beside her, took out his notebook.

Is your mom looking for you?

“I don’t know,” Michelle said. “Probably not. Who cares? I’ve been gone before.”

When?

“Last year. I slept in a garage at the end of our street for a couple of days.”

The Kid tried to remember when that would have been, tried to remember seeing her in class last year, noticing something different about her.

Were they mad when you came back?

“Who?”

Your mom and her boyfriend.

“Yeah, they were pretty fucking mad.”

What’s going to happen this time?

“When?”

When you go home.

“Nothing’s going to happen. I’m not going home.”

You can’t stay here forever.

“I know that. You think I don’t know that?”

I can’t bring food every day.

“Kid, I know that, for fuck’s sake. Just shut up about it already.”

She picked up an issue of
Extraordinary Adventures
, flipped angrily through the pages. She wasn’t careful with the comic at all. The Kid worried she was going to rip the cover.

“Those fuckers just came at me,” she said. “Some drunk bums. They came out of the dark and started grabbing at me. I fought them, but I don’t know how many there were. There could have been ten of them, I don’t know. All those grabbing hands. If there were less of them I could have fought, but there were too many. So I ran out of there, but they had my backpack.”

The Kid thought about his mom maybe sleeping outside, sleeping in a park somewhere on the way to Chicago and getting attacked by some drunk men.

Michelle said, “Is it true that you stopped talking because your mom died?”

The Kid thought about this. The answer was yes and no. The answer was more complicated than that. He made his usual decision, that it was easier just not to answer.

“What happened to her?” Michelle said.

The Kid figured it was better to tell her his dad’s story. His own story was too complicated.

Something exploded in her head.

Michelle thought about this for a second. The Kid could see her picturing it, what she thought it meant.

“Why?”

She was sick with something that she didn’t know about.

“Who told you that?”

My dad.

Michelle put one comic down, picked up another. “I wish my mom would die. I wish something would explode in her head. My mom’s boyfriend, too. My sisters. I wish everybody’s head would explode.” She sat back. “Did you ever wish that? That your mom would have died?

No.

“Your dad?”

The Kid didn’t answer. He looked at the mural, the cannonballs flying from the guns on the pirate ship.

“Did you ever wish that? If you could have picked one or the other?”

Yes.

“It’s a fucking bad thing to think,” Michelle said. “To wish for someone to be dead. But I think it all the time. Do you think it’s possible to think about it hard enough for it to happen? It’s a stupid thing to wonder, but I don’t know. Maybe if you just have that thought long enough it becomes something else. It just happens, finally. Like what’s going on with the computers. They don’t believe that next year is going to happen, so they get all fucked up and destroy the world and then next year really doesn’t happen.” She finished flipping through the comic, set it on the floor by the candle. “Are you mad about the books? That I lost those comics?”

Not really.

She looked around the room, at the mural, the hole in the ceiling. “Are you going to go home soon?” she said.

The Kid nodded.

“You want to stay until maybe I start sleeping? I’ll start sleeping and then you can leave.”

The Kid knew he should go home, knew his dad would be angry if he came home and The Kid wasn’t there, but he also knew he couldn’t just leave Michelle alone like this.

He turned the page in his notepad.
Okay.

She moved the comics and juice boxes away from the candle, tipped herself over onto her back. Didn’t put her hands up under her head, just let her head rest on the hard wood. She looked up at the ceiling for a while, her eyes drooping closed.

“Once I start snoring or whatever, you can go,” she said. “Until then, just sit here for a while, okay?”

The Kid nodded again, even though she couldn’t see him. He sat there while the candle flickered, a half hour, an hour, different parts of the mural appearing and disappearing. He thought about Matthew, if maybe they would never be friends again. He thought about Arizona and if she’d read the comic, if she was still afraid of him. He thought about Michelle wishing that everyone she knew was dead. He thought about something exploding in his mom’s head. A half hour, an hour, maybe longer, until Michelle’s snoring filled the room.

He left the rabbit there with her, the wooden rabbit he’d found in his dad’s drawer. He left it sitting on the floor between the candle and the door, a strange thing to do, a stupid thing to do, like this little wooden rabbit could protect her somehow, like this thing could guard the room. But he did it anyway, stupid or not. He didn’t know why. It just seemed like the right thing to do. He left the rabbit and strapped his backpack over his shoulders and crept quietly out of the house, back up the street toward home.

He rarely went into that room. He did not sleep in the bed. It was their bed, the bed they’d bought when they moved into their first apartment, a drafty, leaky pair of rooms off Wilshire Boulevard. The bed they’d brought with them when they bought the house. The bed Darby had to be dragged out of on Saturday mornings. The bed she sat awake in many nights, drinking tea, reading magazines, waiting for sleep. The bed where they argued. The bed where they woke pressed close, with tangled limbs. The bed where they made The Kid.

On the day the cops told him she was gone, after Bob had come and gone, after The Kid had gone upstairs, Darby had tried to sleep in that room. He’d turned out the lights, gotten into bed. The room was cold and quiet. After a while, he could hear a noise from The Kid’s room, a muffled whimper that grew slowly to a moan, to loud crying. He could hear dull thumps, The Kid punching his bedroom wall. He knew he should go up, hold The Kid until he was able to sleep or until morning, whichever came first. But he stayed in the bed, pressed the pillow over his ears, unable to move, ashamed at what he couldn’t do. His son moaning in the house. He held himself under the pillow until the sounds of The Kid faded away, until he could hear nothing but the rush of blood in his ears. He woke hours later. The room was dark, the house was silent. He could smell her, the warm smell of Lucy asleep, her hair and sweat. He wanted to cry out with relief. He’d had some kind of terrible dream. He reached across the bed for her, her warmth in the night. He found nothing but cool sheets, empty space. A shock ran through him. The truth of the thing. He got out of bed and went outside. He climbed into the pickup and sat shaking. He had to fight the urge to drive. He knew that if he started the engine, if he pulled onto the street, he would never come back. He knew that if he started the engine he would leave his son. He threw the keys out the window to get them away. He turned on the radio. He sat on his hands so he wouldn’t open the door, retrieve the keys, drive. Talk shows on the radio, diet advice, real estate advice. He thought about her smell in the bed, he held that scent with him until he couldn’t hold it any longer, until it slipped from him, until it was gone. He sat on his hands and told himself the story that he had told The Kid, the story he had told Bob. He sat until he could picture her falling in her classroom, the awful scene, her cheek pressed to the cold floor. He sat until he could picture a student from her class lifting her, holding her in his arms, carrying her down the hall. He sat until he could see that she was not alone in that last moment, until he could picture her being held, even if he was not the one holding her. He sat in the pickup until the sun came up, until the story he had told The Kid became the only story he knew. He pulled his hands out from under his thighs. They were dumb and lifeless, unresponsive. He shook them, waited for some feeling to return, the first pricks of electricity in his thumbs, his fingers. He looked up and saw The Kid’s face in his bedroom window, The Kid looking down at him in the truck, and he was overcome by the shame of what he couldn’t do, what he had been unable to do, sitting in the pickup, desperately shaking his hands.